Justice League Reshoots Are Still Following Snyder’s Plan

Justice League is set to premiere November 17th, and not until then will rumors stop swirling around the DC Extended Universe’s flagship team-up movie. The current rumors have ranged from speculation around Ben Affleck’s future with the franchise to potential changes to the film’s ending, and even the suggestion that nearly the entire movie is being reshot. We’ve already extensively covered why many of these rumors are highly suspect and should be taken with a grain of salt, but a new report from Mark Hughes on Superhero News has provided some much-needed clarification to the behind the scenes situation, specifying that the Joss Whedon-led Justice League reshoots have not deviated significantly from the original plans laid forth by Zack Snyder.

Of the numerous claims made about the reshoots, restructuring, and othertonal adjustments going on in the wake of Snyder’s departure, the oldest and most prominent rumor has been that the movie has basically been reshot twice, or at least seeing some sort of massive overhaul due to additional photography. These rumors usually cite the fact that the reshoot schedule is much longer than movies typically take for additional photography, but Hughes’ sources say this is definitely not the case, and the delays are due to complicated scheduling, not to the significance of the reshoots:

“As of right now, despite the fact that there’s been some extended time and it’s like ‘ok, if this is still – why are they still doing shoots on this,’ there’s been a lot of downtime in between shooting because of people’s schedules – they have not been shooting this entire time. The amount of content that has been shot and is being shot is still pretty much what they expected and figured was going to be happening. They haven’t said ‘oh, we need to add additional – we need to do a whole bunch more,’ or anything like that at this point, so, the footage and the amount of footage in the film, as of right now, the majority of the footage that you’re going to see on the screen is still the footage that was previously shot during principal photography… I know I’ve seen people worried and say ‘why is it taking so long,’ it’s because this is post – this is reshooting and filming that requires people’s schedules to line up, getting things in order, so it has not been as easy as they expected it to be when this was all being planned months ago.”

This lines up with previous reports stating that because Jason Momoa is working on Aquaman in Austrailia, Ezra Miller is working on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2, and Henry Cavill was working on Mission Impossible 6 and couldn’t shave the mustache he had grown for that part, necessitating that WB remove said facial hair in post production. Sure, Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot had much more open schedules, but since it was difficult to get all six actors in front of the camera at the same time, it only makes sense that there would be large gaps in time between shooting days, potentially contributing to Snyders’ decision to sit the process out.